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Is being a woman in business still a liability?
You’re a young woman with no experience.
A woman- that- that’s a minus.
Well of course it’s a fucking minus. I didn’t make the world.
As Succession’s Logan Roy decides which of his four offspring might inherit
his media empire throne, on paper his smart and hard-working daughter Shiv
seems like the most capable contender.
But Shiv feels she’s been treated differently for being a woman – and she’s right.
I always thought you were the smartest.
Oh so that’s why you tried Roman and Kendall first.
The people in her world are open about just how much her gender is seen as a
downside. She’s trotted out when having a female executive is useful for a crisis
or a deal and then, once that passes, again sidelined, overlooked, mocked, or held to
a higher standard than her brothers.
Corporate daycare.
Sorpit daybear. Sh *fart noise*
That’s not a good retort. Don’t fucking laugh at that!
In case you want it in writing…
But Succession does a great job of dealing with not just how the “woman” dynamics
realistically play out around Shiv, but also how they’ve shaped her psychologically.
Due to the bias around her, Shiv gets less training from a young age –
so at first she isn’t as ready to manage as her brothers.
You can’t blame her for a lack of experience.
Well sure you can. Just watch- you’ll get the hang of it soon enough.
There’s a vicious cycle at play, where she overreacts and overcompensates,
copying the toxic behavior her dad’s modeled for the company.
As a result, Shiv has been molded into an arrogant–yet-insecure Girlboss
who not only doesn’t help other women
but often weaponizes feminism in service of her family.
Here’s our take on how Succession uses Shiv to accurately illustrate how being
marginalized as a woman or member of another outsider group can work against
you, wear you down and very much mess you up.
Shiv Roy shows how, contrary to how much of today’s rhetoric, being a woman
near the top of many work cultures
is still an obstacle – but there are a lot of complicated reasons why.
Don’t get us wrong: as an individual, Shiv has plenty of flaws and isn’t that likable.
Rhea is right when she says: Shiv thinks she’s smarter than she is.
Having grown up rich with everything handed to her but noticed she’s
at least smarter than her brothers, Shiv has developed an epic level of arrogance.
She’s impatient for rewards without working for them, thinks she knows things before
developing expertise, and displays a dangerous combination of
entitlement and inexperience.
Yet a lot of the problem is also Shiv’s
reacting to and compounding her disadvantage.
One lesson Shiv internalizes is that her achievements don’t count.
In Season 3 we see her pull off a huge win that saves the family from losing
the company, but her dad again denies her the credit.
Then when Roman brings in the fascist presidential candidate Jeryd Menken,
Logan lavishes praise on his son.
You did good this weekend, son.
And there’s a vicious cycle at play for Shiv:
the more she feels she has to prove herself and doesn’t get validation, the more she
feels defensive, desperate to get recognition
rather than open to receiving the training and experience she actually needs.
Roman's COO? You have a toddler with a hard-on for Chief Operating Officer,
and I’m going through a management training program?
Shiv then gets in her way in numerous work interactions by overcompensating.
Like many ambitious female precursors –
going back to Lady Macbeth’s doomed quest to unsex herself – she feels she has
to act more like a tough guy with a “big dick” energy than even the boys do.
But this act doesn’t get her respect from
the men around her, who generally don’t like the level of brash assertiveness from
a female executive that they tolerate in a male one.
Karl's not happy with your level of input.
Oh. OK. Well, fuck him, right?
I don't need another toothache.
Logan tends to keep Shiv more behind the scenes than her brothers.
And then, even when her father does put her in formal positions of power
(like when he privately chooses her as his heir or installs her as president)
it’s not long before he undermines that by freezing her out, having secret interactions
with her brothers about major business, not backing her up, or letting her know
she’s on thin ice if she ever makes an error.
Well, you OKed me to go in there and kick some ass, and I barely…
I gave you a destination. I can't walk you there, OK?
This situation, repeated over and over, has made Shiv both resentful
and deeply insecure.
Initially even Shiv herself doesn’t really think becoming the CEO is a possibility,
so she looks to her husband Tom to rise in the company.
Like her siblings, she’s been falsely empowered by her wealth to view herself
baselessly as above others, but because of her gender, she’s been shamed by her
father into a state where she views herself as below.
As therapist Tammy Nelson told the Cut,
Shiv’s performance of confidence is
“based on sort of the internal hill of sand because she’s not confident about herself
as a woman and as a worker. She looks to her father to feel confident.”
And when she does get moments to lead,
she sometimes chokes, loses control and makes a big gaffe,
Sometimes I think you just need a good ‘ol fashioned dinosaur cull.
And who’s the big trex in your sights?
Oh- I- no… I
or fails to summon the confidence to meet challenges decisively.
It’s the sort of tough choice people need to be able to make.
People who would be very senior people.
I can’t choose Dad.
So if we look deeper, we can see how much Shiv and her flaws have been shaped and
exacerbated by her culture’s hostility to her being a woman. In a work context,
she’s expected, at various points, to compensate for being a woman,
act like she’s not, use it, and sell her gender out in order to get ahead in this world.
She’s put at the forefront whenever there’s a sensitive crisis involving women or
progressive issues – culminating in her even talking a sexual abuse victim out of
testifying against her family.
And of course, those favors where she has to disown her womanness
aren’t even remembered.
So in order to prove to her family that her being a woman isn’t an issue,
she’s not even allowed to truly “be” one.
From childhood, Shiv felt the main female model in her life
– her cruel Mother – was grotesque.
You were my onion. You are my onion.
When her mother isn’t physically absent, she’s emotionally violent to Shiv.
Truth is I probably should never have had children.
Shiv has inherited some of this, even while trying to reject her mother and more
consciously modeling herself on her narcissistic, bullying father.
We get it already- stop moaning about the rapes.
The toxic male behavior she’s learned to ape from her dad and the company is taken
to an extreme in her most intimate personal relationship. She becomes a bully in her
relationship with her husband, Tom, making him into her punching bag –
just as everyone in the Roy media empire falls somewhere on the abusive hierarchy,
receiving pain from the higher-ups and passing it down.
You’re not good enough for me.
No I’m way out of your fucking league…
And because of the way Shiv has mistreated Tom and
based their relationship on inequality,
That’s why you love me. Even though I don’t love you…
he eventually feels justified betraying her to seize his own power.
So overall, Shiv’s toxicity is a realistic portrayal of the fact that when people are
excluded due to gender, race, or other factors, this doesn’t necessarily prove the
adage that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Instead adversity can provoke
unhealthy coping habits that aren’t beneficial in the long run.
There’s no denying, Shiv is a pioneer in her field…
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Shiv is an extreme version of the self- serving “Girlboss” type who trades on her
gender when it helps her, but happily screws over other women for personal profit.
But a trademark of the Girlboss is secret hypocrisy –
and Shiv is pretty open about her cynical self-centeredness.
Deep down- she’s status and money obsessed like you…
One of the conflicts in Shiv’s life is trying to
decide whether to not be a terrible person, or just double down and embrace it.
When the series begins, she’s working for progressive, Bernie Sanders-esque
presidential candidate Gil Eavis, and she talks like she (maybe) wants to do
something good for the world, as long as there’s enough in it for her.
Yet her pretenses of having morals fall away
when she gets a shot at running her father’s company.
Shiv’s conflict between her two sides plays out in the first season through her affair with
Nate, who describes himself as an
“exciting bastard” in comparison to her “nice” fiance Tom.
Tom is a great guy.
Sure, great guy with a square head.
You should be with an exciting bastard like me.
These two men represent the two disjointed sides of Shiv– on the one hand is her
arrogance: she views herself as the exciting bastard: someone who’s mean yet better
than everyone else. But on the other hand is her insecurity: she likes that Tom feels like a
safe partner who will worship and never leave her, because she has a buried sense
of inferiority. Shiv flip flops between these selves: she frequently laments
that she’s not a nice or good person
We should be good people.
I know.
Like wouldn’t it be nice to wake up one morning and not feel like a
fucking piece of shit.
but mostly comforts herself she’s at least marginally more ethical than
the rest of her family while not really behaving differently from them.
You tell yourself that you're a good person, but you're not a good person.
In the end, neither of Shiv’s opposing self- images is really true.
Her affair with Nate doesn’t end up being that exciting, and in the end,
her “nice” husband Tom turns out
to be not as nice or safe as she thought after he sells her out in Season 3.
Her conception of herself as an ultra- talented bastard is likewise proven false.
She makes a fair number of mistakes when actually given a shot in the business,
and interestingly, in Season 3, she surprises herself when she draws a line at helping a
fascist presidential candidate–
so it turns out she kind of does have a few principles after all.
Mencken is an integralist, nativist, fuckhead, he’s toxic…
More centrally, in her reconciliation with her brothers in the Season 3 finale,
we also see the beginnings of a desire to openly communicate emotions in a positive
sense. This is something Shiv is historically terrible at.
Her wedding speech is a cringey showcase of how hard it is for her
to actually show emotion, and she chooses
her wedding night to tell her husband she wants an open relationship.
We have a plan but in terms of the relationship I’m wondering if there’s a
chance for something different from the whole box set death march.
When she discusses having children
with him, she’s not only terribly unromantic about it
Did you mean it, about the baby?
Yeah, we should freeze at least.
but also oddly jumps to discussing divorce and comas.
It’s different if one of us dies or is in a long term coma
You know I don’t just automatically get them
if we divorce or something like that if that’s the thing that concerns you.
And she repeatedly tells Tom she doesn’t love him, but in ways that make us wonder if
she almost does? (or would if she could love anyone that way)?
You know, Tom, I may not love you, but I do love you…
So it’s a big step in the Season Finale when she awkwardly tries to participate in
unsarcastically being there for the suffering Kendall and an even bigger one when she
suggests the siblings start saying the tough things out loud to each other.
You know dad is never gonna choose you.
I'm sorry but maybe it’s time we say these things to each other…
As the siblings try for the first time to truly band together into Season 4, not creating
a binary between niceness and ambition could be Shiv’s only chance to transcend
her self-destructive pattern of being both hyper-arrogant and hyper-insecure.
Her road to becoming a more mature, and actually more successful, adult may be
tapping into that “nice” side of her –
but not as a compromise or a settling, the way she’s always seen it.
She just needs to have some equal
human relationships, which can be both loving and honest.
Shiv has to learn not to base her self- esteem on the approval of her father,
the ultimate patriarchal figure who will never be able to see her separate from the
“minus” of her being a woman.
She can’t help how her world sees her gender, but she can potentially learn to stop
making the woman thing become an extra problem to herself.
That’s the take.
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